And While You're at It, Do Sign In. It's Easier

The Mountain View based company has had it with inexperienced users that don't know their way around the many and vast opportunities presented to them. It started hinting at creating accounts and signing in and cooing over the many advantages presented to the user.

The example presented by Google was that of the Google News homepage, accessible from anywhere in the world via the Internet (obviously, but they wanted to particularly remind it to the users) that can be personalized with custom selections from other regional and language editions.

There must be a catch to this - I said when I read about it - and it really is. In order to keep your settings and tabs you must sign in to your Google account, or else everything will be deleted and every time you try to check out you'll have to restart building that personalized page that you worked so hard on the first time. Working on optimizing and making your iGoogle better can actually grow on you and become addictive. The desire to make everything more accessible and easier to get to is very, very tempting, I've been at it for about three weeks, and I still find things to do every day. On average, I do this for about a half an hour per day, seven days a week but I've heard of people that allocate more time to this activity.

Why "catch"? Because by signing in and continuing with your daily Internet routine from there, you help Google learn more about you by your clicking on links and it will in return provide you with more targeted and personalized ads. And the News homepage would probably be the first thing you check out every morning, I mean who checks the news late at night? That's why they're called news, to be fresh and next to your cup of coffee (I ad-libbed that part with the coffee, don't start drinking if you're not its regular client, it's not compulsory). First, sign in for the news and then all the clicking on your part? A successful data gathering session for Google, I say.

In all aspects, the Google news homepage is quite nice and if you don't have the ad problem that I have, it shouldn't bother you all that much. And with its customization at the click of a mouse it might yet become your best friend on the Internet especially because you get to have everything at hand, Gmail and other Google products included.